When I started watching TV there were two dials with fine-tuning rings and an on/off/volume knob. Today I have 56 buttons on just one of my remote controls, not to mention that some buttons have multiple functions depending on the history of button presses.

I think the Google remote is a reasonably good design; it's one of the features I like.

I have the book and I initially bought the electronic copy through Amazon to read using Kindle software on my PC and Droid X.

Even on a 1920x1080 21" display, I found some of the diagrams to be illegible. In particular, figure 15-14 was completely unusable.

As a result, I returned the electronic version and bought the paper version from my local Barnes & Noble. I then bought a PDF copy from Apress.com for $10 more since I registered my copy with them.

I have found the book to be pretty good but landing more in the reference camp than the tutorial camp. I need the reference so I'm glad to have the book but I need a good tutorial on creating themes for Drupal 7 and I'm still looking.

I don't think anyone will be as influential in the computer world. It was a much smaller community back then and it was easier to stand out. That's not to say there won't be people who do things that are as meaningful but they will now be one of dozens of projects.

If a person is going to be that sort of stand out today, he will have to be in another field - perhaps nanotechnology or bio-engineering - where the foundations are still being laid.

I was running Coherent at the time and looking for something better. I'd looked at Minix but I was looking for something open. I started playing with Linux as soon as code first became available for download and also played with 386BSD which had the lead over Linux for some time. Soon after that, the AT&T lawsuit began to cast a pall over the BSD community and Linux got TCP/IP going. Not wanting to depend on something potentially embroiled in a lawsuit (who might get sued wasn't clear then), I went with Linux as my base OS. Since then, I have continued to dabble with the various BSDs and use OpenBSD when security is a strong concern but Linux has been my first choice. It's interesting to wonder how things might have turned out if the lawsuit hadn't happened.

When you buy into a subdivision with a HOA, you are told that fact up front -- no one makes you move into an area with a HOA. People choose to live with a HOA after they've experienced the Neighbor From Hell a time or two. The HOA is the lesser of the two evils.

If HFT were to be legislatively controlled, it seems to me the most obvious way to do it would be by modifying the long and short term capital gains taxes to create a progressive system: the longer you hold the asset before taking the capital gain, the less tax you pay. If you had to pay 99% tax on a gain resulting from possessing an asset for less than 1 minute things would be a lot different.

This is not to say that I favor that solution, it's just one that occurs to me. I think there's a solution that doesn't require the use of force. If I were the CEO of a publicly company, I would not want to be listed on an exchange that allows HFT. If I were an amateur investor in stocks, I would not want to invest in companies listed on an exchange that allows HFT. As a result, there's clearly a market for a 'natural' exchange as opposed to one that is 'on steroids'.

peter hoffman writes: SiteClonez's Swoopo clone ships with an issue and a bug that make it unusable.

The issue is that you cannot create any accounts with the system as shipped due to a unicode error in the CakePHP library that happens on many Linux systems (e.g., Slackware 12.2). This is not SiteClonez's fault but it indicates a lack of proper testing.

The bug is that one user can see and edit the billing/shipping addresses of another user.

The documentation is nearly non-existent and the code is insufficiently documented to make up for that.

I have supplied fixes to them, reported someone who was selling a stolen copy of their code to them, and supplied improved documentation.

However, despite it being a commercial product with support advertised, they have been completely silent after their first support email which asked for some environment information.

In response to a post on reddit, SiteClonez created an account, pretended to be a happy customer, and never responded again.